Transcultural Jewishness: The Jew in Diasporic and Postcolonial Literatureand Theory

Co-chairs: Sarah Phillips Casteel and Jennifer Glaser

Following Paul Gilroy's and Jonathan Boyarin's early calls for a dialoguebetween Jewish studies and postcolonial studies as well as Bryan Cheyette'simportant work on Jewishness and race, scholars have begun to situateJewishness in interethnic contexts that move beyond the standardarticulations of black/Jewish relations.

Building on this work and charting new paths of inquiry, this panel willexplore literary representations of Jewishness in a transcultural andcomparative framework. We will move away from the study of single ethnicgroups in isolation in order to develop more contextual, dynamic, andcross-cultural models of literary analysis such as that recently advancedin Jonathan Freedman's Klezmer America. The panel will consider Jewishnessand its "other Others" in both U.S. and non-U.S. settings including Canadaand Britain as well as other national and transnational contexts.

We invite proposals that respond to the problematic outlined above and/orconsider one or more of the following questions:

Â· why is Jewishness a popular trope in contemporary writing by non-Jewishdiasporic and postcolonial authors such as Zadie Smith and Caryl Phillips?

Â· how can Jewishness be brought more fully into discussions ofmulticultural and postcolonial literatures? what are the challenges andtensions surrounding such a move?

Â· what are the alternatives to dominant articulations of Jewishness'srelationship to other ethnic minorities such as discussions of black/Jewishrelations in the United States?

Â· what institutional and disciplinary histories and politics have shapedJewish studies' relationship to fields such as ethnic studies,multicultural studies, and postcolonial studies?

**Important note: All paper proposals must be submitted on the ACLAconference website, located at http://www.acla.org/acla2009/. Just selectthe "Transcultural Jewishness" seminar from the menu accessible from thispage and your abstract will go directly to the conference organizer. **

If you have any questions prior to submitting your abstract, please don'thesitate to contact the seminar co-chairs, Jennifer Glaser(glaserjr_at_ucmail.uc.edu) and Sarah Phillips Casteel(sarah_casteel_at_carleton.ca).